Maurice Thorez

1900-1964

“It’s not communism that expropriates the peasant’s field, or the merchant’s store, that ruins the small and medium industrialists, helpless to put up with the competition of the trusts. It’s not communism that set alight class struggle. But it’s capitalism that destroys the property of the little people in order to take it over; that buys at a low price the labor of the worker and makes weigh upon him the full weight of oppression and coercion. War, economic crisis, unemployment, the expropriation and ruin of the middle classes are not our doing. They are the result of the private property of the great means of production, which has become — after having been a stimulant — a hindrance to economic life and progress. The property of the great means of production is the only one that should be socialized, if we want to lay down the base for a rational economy.” The Popular Front.